Interview with Thomas Woschitz
Trieste Film Festival 2006
About Closing Time
Do you think that there's a different approach in making short movies and long ones in terms of narrative structure? Can a short film be less narrative?
I've worked for a long time on small projects, like short films or installations and I think that there's a difference with long film. In a short film you can focus on a story, but you can also work just with images, focusing more on the cinematographic language experiments. I think that there are many ways of telling a story and you don't always need 90 minutes to do that, sometimes 30 minutes are enough, especially if you're working on something experimental: sometimes there are long films that would have been better as short movies.
Do you think that the director is more free to do what he wants in short films?
Of course. Making a film is very much a matter of money, so the less you need, the more you're free to do what you want. It's pretty hard for a producer to find the money in order to make a film and he can't take too many risks in experimenting if he has to pay for a long movie.
Your film, Closing time, is screened with live music by Naked Lunch: the musicians are behind the screen and play during images. Have you tried this mixing of images and music before or it's a new experiment?
Well, I have some other works in which I experimented a lot with sound, but this is the first time that I’ve done something like that in a proper film. Here there's a story, even if it's very simple, and the idea was to create a common space where both images and music could match making the audience feel particular emotions. In this way people who watch the movie have the possibility of creating their own story in the story.
Were the music and images made separately or together?
The idea was to work on the concept of closing times. I had it in an airport: it was very late and everything was being shut down. Then me and Naked Lunch spoke about the idea of making a film together related to that topic and we started working: they wrote the songs while I was shooting the images, the two processes were really close to each other.
Your film speaks about the end: how would you describe it, what do you think it is?
I have always thought about the ending as a restart of something. I don't think it's possible to experiment with something that really finishes, because when something comes to its final point it always makes something else begin. The end doesn't really exist.
I'm not being spiritual at all, it's a matter of fact.